Silverlight, for Real This Time
PC World | at | by Mike
Microsoft's answer to Adobe Flash and Flex and several other RIA and AJAX frameworks, Silverlight arrived with a flourish just over one year ago. Silverlight 1.0 manipulated its multimedia-savvy, WPF user interface using JavaScript. Silverlight 1.1, which added support for compiled .Net languages and supported more of the .Net API, was available at that time only as an alpha test.
Silverlight 1.1 turned out to be such an important upgrade for Microsoft that it was eventually renumbered Silverlight 2. As delivered now, Silverlight 2 supports all .Net languages, including the dynamic languages such as IronPython and IronRuby, and it contains a good chunk of the .Net base classes, including newer features such as LINQ (language-integrated query).